by Adam Rochford
13. January 2013 19:22
Let's face it, the world of Android games suck. When it comes to strategy games, you are pretty much reduced down to a handful of decent tower defender games. Developers have a hard time justifying development of a game for a system that generally requires a complete rewrite of an app the was written for IOS. That and the fact that most people own an IOS device, not Android. On top of that there are a million Android devices with tons of different hardware and screen sizes. With Apple there just a few devices and a few screen sizes, easing the development process a bit.
Strategy games don't generally sell well, especially on mobile devices. Even when you do find one it's often some sort of pay to win money pit. I bought my Android tablet about 6 months hoping to see a larger influx of strategy games come in. I don't like Apple, I don't like there restrictions and I don't like how they overcharge for every single device and service they sell, just because it is almighty Apple. They have a couple things going for them though, they have huge demand and a huge amount of users, this translates to good apps and good variety. While I have problems with the restrictiveness of there App Store, it does a couple things. It ensures the quality of apps and increase security. All these things combined have created a good ecosystem for Apps in the IOS world.
However if you go over to the Android Google Play store, you find an endless pile of steaming crap. There are crappy apps in the IOS store as well, but not the seemingly endless mile of crap you find in the Android store. Mix that with no real category sorting and bad search filtering and you can't even find the good games because they are drowned in an endless maze of crap. It's pretty terrible that search is so bad on Google Play, considering Google is considered the best with search. If Google can't begin to get developers developing quality titles for Android, then Apple will remain on top of the gaming market, and Sony PSP Vita and Nintendo DS will continue to actually do pretty well in mobile gaming when a few well timed changes could put Android on top. Right now Nintendo DS has better strategy titles than Android, see Civilization, Anno and Age of Empires all actually pretty great games for strategy gamers on a mobile device.
I bought an Android device because I wanted to "fight the power" that is Apple, I didn't want to cave in. However if nothing changes in the next 6 months, I'll be buying a damned IPad, because that is where are all the good boardgames and strategy games are being developed. Google needs to do something about the App Store to start filtering out the crap. A few steps have been taken but nothing that will definitively drive development. If you want good strategy games on your tablet or phone, I would not recommend Android devices.
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